Codespell by Kelly McCullough Page A

really does make you stronger. I’d never have come up with it if I hadn’t had the last faerie ring I built blow up in my face.”

    It was only the second one I’d ever made, and things had not gone at all according to plan. I’d put a lot of work and power into my first ring and had expected to do the same with the second, but no. Quite the contrary really. I’d barely begun when the thing had ignited, another side effect of the Raven transformation and my greater affinity for chaos.

    Melchior rolled his eyes and made like he was about to say something, then paused. His expression went abstract in the way it always did when he received an incoming call over the mweb. Except that wasn’t possible at Raven House. I felt a twinge in the depths of my stomach.

    “You’re not going to believe this,” he said.

    “I’ve got new mail?”

    He nodded. “It’s a request for Vtp from Cerice.”

    “How is she managing that?” I asked.

    “It’s via Taured.”

    “Taured?” The name didn’t ring a bell.

    "Clotho’s new webtroll.” Mel’s voice came out flat and cold.

    “Oh.” That explained it.

    Webtrolls are to Mel what he is to a PDA/pixie like Kira. Heavy-duty supercomputers, webtrolls draw their energy directly from the Primal Chaos. In fact, that’s a big part of their purpose—transforming the raw stuff of chaos into the tame magic that flows through the mweb. The Fates use them to maintain and power the mweb in concert with the master servers and software supplied by Necessity. Their nature allows them to do all sorts of things impossible for a webgoblin like Mel, like connecting to places that aren’t attached to the mweb by making a running calculation of the relative locations of the two DecLoci.

    “What happened to Boxer, her old . . .”

    Melchior looked away. The Fates were very hard on their hardware, and none too keen on the rights of the AI. It was one of the biggest reasons Cerice had resigned from Clotho’s service, bigger even than her relationship with me.

    “How could Cerice go back there?” asked Melchior. “Even for a couple of days?”

    “I don’t know. You’d better put her through. Maybe that way we’ll find out.”

    Melchior nodded, and I spoke the formal request, “Melchior, Vlink; [email protected] to [email protected]. Please.”

    His eyes and mouth shot wide, and light poured out, three beams, blue, red, and green. They met at a point a few feet in front of his face and formed a misty globe of gold that quickly cleared to reveal a three-dimensional image of Cerice. I smiled at her, but the twinge in my belly had returned. She didn’t look very happy.

    “Hello, Cerice. I don’t suppose you’re calling for a ride home?”

    She bit her lip and looked down for a second. “I’m afraid not. I’m going to stay here for a few days.”

    “Clotho make you an offer you couldn’t refuse?” I asked it lightly, but I knew the Fates were more than capable of holding Cerice prisoner. They’d done it once already.

    She shook her head. “No, or at least not that way. Necessity’s really a mess, Ravirn. The virus that you . . . no, that’s not fair. The Persephone virus that Shara carried did a number on her—on the whole mweb. There’s been no communication from Necessity since the day Persephone was freed. None. And the network . . . It’s bad enough that the Fates can’t even tell how bad it is. At least ten percent of the world resource locator forks are fried, but it could be as many as half.”

    “Half?” The question burst out of me.

    Cerice nodded. Half the mweb. That was almost incomprehensible. Even ten percent was terrifying, to say nothing of the silence of Necessity. The mweb ties together a theoretically infinite number of potential worlds. I say theoretically because in theory every decision splits reality such that one branch goes in each direction the decision could have gone. But in practical terms, a lot of decisions are pretty